Aerial photo of the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus from Lake Mendota

The Advances in Social Genomics Conference 2026

Paper Session 2: Methods

Thursday, May 14 — 2:30 to 3:30 p.m.

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Chair

Portrait of Tianyuan Lu

Tianyuan Lu

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Dr. Tianyuan Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences and the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from Fudan University and his PhD in Quantitative Life Sciences from McGill University. He was a Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto before joining UW-Madison. His research focuses on developing and implementing rigorous statistical genetics and genetic epidemiology methods to improve the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of complex diseases, and translating research findings into new medical care approaches and therapies.

Panelists

Portrait of Matthew Maxwell

Matthew Maxwell

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Matthew J. Maxwell is a PhD Candidate in philosophy at the Unviersity of Wisconsin – Madison. His research is on the philosophy of biology with an emphasis on evolutionary theory and population genetics.

Presentation or paper

Population Subdivision and the Search for Disease-Linked Loci: Must K Be Arbitrary?

Portrait of Shihui Peng

Shihui Peng

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Shihui Peng is a PhD student in the Epidemiology program in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on genetic epidemiology and statistical genetics, with an emphasis on studying complex traits using large-scale genomic data. She is particularly interested in improving genetic risk prediction and better understanding the genetic architecture of complex diseases.

Presentation or paper

Improving Cross-Ancestry Generalizability of Genetic Risk Prediction for Short Stature Using a Meta-Polygenic Risk Score

Portrait of Yuchang Wu

Yuchang Wu

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Yuchang Wu is an Assistant Scientist in the BMI department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working in Qiongshi Lu’s group. His research interests include statistical genetics and social genomics.

Presentation or paper

Identifying Overlapping Samples in the PGS Cohort Using Only GWAS Summary Statistics